Matt Delito - Confessions of a Police Constable

Cover

Title Page MATT DELITO Confessions of a Police Constable

Who am I? Who am I? Hi, my name is Matt Delito. I am a police officer in London’s Metropolitan Police Force. Service . I mean Service. In the immortal words of Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz – which, incidentally, should certainly be introduced as mandatory viewing for new recruits to the Metropolitan Police – ‘We’re not calling it a “police force” any more; that’s too aggressive.’ You don’t have to call us the Metropolitan Police Service, or even the MPS – ‘The Met’ will do. Of course, I’m aware that people have an awful lot of other names for us, but many of them aren’t fit to print in a fine publication such as this. When I’m on duty, I am usually on ‘team’. This is short for ‘response team’. We’re the guys who come rushing to your assistance when someone breaks into your house and you dial 999. The borough I work in is one of the busiest in London, and I’m part of one of the best teams around. If we are on duty, and you live, work or play in my part of town, you’re in good hands … Okay, I haven’t been entirely upfront: my name isn’t, in fact, Matt Delito, although it does have a pretty good ring to it. And my collar number is not PC592MD, and I am not based at Southwark (which is what an ‘MD’ shoulder number would usually indicate). If it turns out there’s a PC592MD: I’m sorry, buddy, the number was picked at random. Matt Delito

Pleased to meet you …

Can’t we all just be friends?

The A-hole who dropped the N-bomb

Hell hath no fury like an 11-year-old without BBM

A pinprick is nothing like a paper cut

Sudden Death

Bringing them back from the dead

So … you’re saying you were attacked by a ninja?

The mysterious case of the Belgian bike burglar

Is that a baton you have in your pocket?

Tinker, Tailor … Spy?

Crossing over to the other side

‘Going the Way of the Dojo’

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

A victim of fraud

A Day in the life of a special constable

A long climb

Twisted Sister

An irate customer

Stopping and searching

Slowing down for the weekend

The stolen iPad

One of those shifts

The arrest enquiry

A shot to the heart

Ambushed in the Riots

Epilogue

Footnotes

Glossary and abbreviations

Identity codes

Police ranks

Acknowledgements

Read On …

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The stories in this book describe my experiences working as a police constable in London. To protect confidentiality, not everything I write can be one hundred per cent the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – some parts have been fictionalised, and names and locations have been changed. I’m unable to share some of my favourite stories because they are part of investigations in progress. Others I must amend slightly because I don’t want to put my colleagues at risk by revealing operationally sensitive information. Most importantly, I really like my job, and I would rather not get dismissed.

Hi, my name is Matt Delito.

I am a police officer in London’s Metropolitan Police Force. Service . I mean Service. In the immortal words of Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz – which, incidentally, should certainly be introduced as mandatory viewing for new recruits to the Metropolitan Police – ‘We’re not calling it a “police force” any more; that’s too aggressive.’

You don’t have to call us the Metropolitan Police Service, or even the MPS – ‘The Met’ will do. Of course, I’m aware that people have an awful lot of other names for us, but many of them aren’t fit to print in a fine publication such as this.

When I’m on duty, I am usually on ‘team’. This is short for ‘response team’. We’re the guys who come rushing to your assistance when someone breaks into your house and you dial 999. The borough I work in is one of the busiest in London, and I’m part of one of the best teams around. If we are on duty, and you live, work or play in my part of town, you’re in good hands …

Okay, I haven’t been entirely upfront: my name isn’t, in fact, Matt Delito, although it does have a pretty good ring to it. And my collar number is not PC592MD, and I am not based at Southwark (which is what an ‘MD’ shoulder number would usually indicate).

If it turns out there’s a PC592MD: I’m sorry, buddy, the number was picked at random.

Matt Delito

I was slumped back against a tree stump at the edge of the park, watching the two youths run off into the distance. I was only dimly aware of the electronic device I was holding in my hand.

‘Hello? Hello!?’

The little machine was making sounds, but they barely registered in my consciousness. Somehow, I made out the noise of my watch beeping twice, signifying that it was 3 a.m.

‘This,’ I thought to myself, ‘has been a particularly rotten day.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself – introductions first.

I’m Matt.

I’m a police officer, but I haven’t always been. I’ve had quite a few different jobs in my time, including working in a petrol station (I would tell you that it was a barrel of laughs if it wasn’t such an easy-to-detect lie). I also worked as a runner for the BBC one particularly memorable summer. That was exciting; I got to meet all sorts of interesting people. Jeremy Clarkson, for example. He told me to fuck off once, which was probably the highlight of my pre-police career. I suppose that goes some way towards explaining why I prefer to talk about my career on the force than about life before I zipped up my Kevlar Metvest for the first time.

I’d like to invite you, for a minute, to think about what your average day consists of. No, go on, I’ll just sit back and have a few sips of my coffee whilst you ponder. Unless you’re my OP/IRV (this is the operator – aka the person who isn’t the driver – on an Incident Response Vehicle), your days will probably be slightly different from mine.

But what do I do all day? When I got tired of explaining this to my enquiring friends (and listening to their complaints about police officers: ‘I don’t like you lot – you gave my sister a ticket for speaking on her mobile when she was driving’), I decided it was time I started writing some of it down. That was well over a year ago now, and the result is the stack of dead trees, or the weightless, electron-powered virtual version thereof you are holding in your hands.

But I digress.

Where was I? Oh, yes, slumped against a tree.

I had just come off duty after a particularly long and dreary shift. It was late on a hot but rapidly cooling July evening and I was cycling home. Yes, ‘cycling’. I would not normally cycle so late but my motorbike had been involved in an unfortunate run-in with a bin lorry whilst it was parked outside the police station. I can’t really be sure that it was an accident rather than a particularly potent anti-police lash-out, but either way, the result was that my poor motorbike was stuck at the Yamaha dealership, and I was downgraded from triple-digit horsepower to zero-point-not-a-lot of horsepower, sweating and swearing in equal measure as I wrestled my pushbike along the godforsaken bicycle paths.

I was cycling through the park, through the dark, through the night, when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted some movement. At nearly 3 a.m., in a less-than-glamorous slice of town, movement generally signifies bad news, so I slowed down to take a closer look.